The suspense is chilling.  On Friday, two important market bellwethers, AMZN and Boeing, came down precisely to their respective thresholds of trouble before rallying out of the hole. Shortly thereafter, North Korea’s nut-job dictator one-upped Wall Street’s premature and unwarranted sigh of relief, announcing that his missile launchers were on standby.

All of us, traders and investors in particular, have gotten used to having geopolitical crises, even seemingly world-shaking ones, blow over quickly. Not this time, I fear. Since we can’t know exactly where Kim’s missiles are headed until they are in the air, or what kind of payload they are carrying, we’ll have to start shooting them down as they leave their launchers or silos.  That means even North Korea’s test firings will have to be treated as acts of war from now on.

Say Goodbye to Politics-as-Usual

That’s going to transcend politics-as-usual in the U.S., as even Trump’s most vociferous doubters must already recognize.  It would appear that a generally complacent world is about to find out what the word ‘crisis’ means.

It will inevitably be written someday that North Korea’s dictator caused the bull market to end, assuming it has. This is poppycock; the bull has been looking for years for a good reason to end. Sitting on a precipice, all it needed was just a little shove.  Kim Jong Un won’t even qualify as the Black Swan who made it happen, since his name was already near the top of every permabear’s list of Things That Could Go Dreadfully Wrong.